With the recent development of a large scale storage medium (memory), picture image filing systems of the type described above have found increasing practical applications, in which various kinds of picture image original documents, such as design drawings, are optically read out, photo-electrically converted, and stored in a memory as digital picture image information, so that a picture image data designated as needed can be read out of the memory to thereby display the image on a cathode ray tube as a visual image, or output as a hard copy.
In such a picture image filing system, it is a serious problem as to how to efficiently perform new registration and retrieval of each picture image.
Conventionally, when a picture image original document is to be written into a memory from an input device, the picture image original document is optically read out, and the read-out data is digitized and stored. At the same time, a retrieval data including the name of the drawing management system, the name of the department/section, the name of the designer/figure drawer, the date of figure drawing, the title, etc., is additionally inputted by means of a keyboard or the like and stored.
Further, in picture image retrieving, an operator of the system inputs first the above-mentioned retrieval data, such as the title of a desired picture image, through a keyboard or the like so as to read out the desired picture image on the basis of the matching of the retrieval data, and the read out picture image is displayed or printed.
Such a conventional method as above, however, is disadvantageous in that not only is the manual input operation of the retrieval data troublesome and inefficient but there is a risk of an incorrect input. Accordingly, it is necessary to provide a method of inputting a retrieval data without manual operation.